An immense amount of information is being created and made available for users to access via electronic communications systems. Such information includes, for example, search result listings from search engines, the contents of electronic product catalogs, and postings on commercial blogs, personal blogs, and social networking sites. There is so much information available that it is impossible for an individual to read more than a tiny fraction of the whole.
To help address this problem, websites and other types of information systems often organize information into categories that are intended to facilitate a user's ability to navigate to and access the information of particular interest to a user. A blog discussing computer programming issues, for example, may provide access to the blog's postings through links to categories with descriptive names such as, “Java”, “Ruby”, “Ruby on Rails”, “Artificial Intelligence”, “Lisp”, “Perl”, “Python”, “Web Applications”, “AJAX”, “Search”, “Javascript”, “Object Mapping”, “Smalltalk”, “Seaside”, “Squeak”, “Semantic Web” and “Data Mining.” Likewise, e-commerce websites and other types of interactive systems may also implement recommendation services that recommend items stored or represented in a data repository. These services can operate, for example, by receiving an input list of items (possibly with associated item weights), and by outputting a ranked list of items that are deemed to be collectively similar or related to the input set. To assist a user (and potential buyer) of the e-commerce website, these recommended items may be organized into groups and presented to the user through descriptively named categories.
The categories presented to a user sometimes includes significant redundancy between the categories. For example, a posting from the illustrative computer programming blog mentioned above may be accessible via many different categories depending upon its content. Likewise, a recommended DVD from an e-commerce website may be accessible via several different categories presented to the user, the different categories reflecting different attributes of the DVD. The film “Blade Runner”, for example, may be among a list of recommended items presented to the user via descriptively named categories. “Blade Runner” may be presented to the user through many different categories, such as the film genres “Science Fiction”, “Action”, “Thriller”, and “Drama” and other categories such as “Harrison Ford” (the lead actor), “Ridley Scott” (the director), and “Philip K. Dick” (the author of the science fiction novel from which the screenplay was written).
The existence of redundancy in presenting information to a user can significantly hinder the ability of the user to efficiently locate and access the information of interest to the user. By presenting the same information to a user many times in different categories, a user reading through the categories is forced to spend time rereading information that he or she has already reviewed. Furthermore, the user is required to navigate through more entries (e.g. lists, links, scroll arrows, etc.) to access new and fresh information that may be of greater interest. This problem can become severe given the limited amount of space available to display information on common user interface displays. If the redundancy within different categories presented to a user is too onerous or annoying, the user may lose patience, become frustrated, and cease searching entirely.